This offensive and self-serving review fails to note that the intention of the editors in inviting the contributions was to show `something of the liveliness and diversity of the current state of studies of the multiple issues which were involved in the relation of religion and medicine in seventeenth century England' (Introduction, p.4.) The reviewer, by contrast, appears to

James Walvin needs no introduction to students of slavery since, over the last thirty years, he has been one of the most prolific writers on the history of American slavery among the academic fraternity on both sides of the Atlantic.

Not long ago Cormac Ó Gráda lamented the dearth of scholarly writing about the Great Famine. Since then the drought has been broken by a deluge. Some outpourings are far from scholarly; some fall into the category of what D.H. Atkenson has recently described as "Famine porn" as their authors scour the lexicon of shocking vocabulary to arouse our indignation.

In this curious 'book review' by Dr Clarkson, the author seems to be unclear whether he is in the business of seeking to implement a professional review on a book, or is attempting to attack my supposed character and attitudes. In both regards, this tepid collection of pretentious assertions is as pathetic as it is inaccurate.

Kathleen Wilson's fine study complements earlier work by Peter Borsay and Nicholas Rogers which seek to rehabilitate the role of urban provincial centres as sites of popular political politics with an oppositional focus.

'Geography is about maps, History about chaps': a tired cliché, of course, though it tells us something about the ways in which disciplinary boundaries were constructed during the relatively recent past. Few historians today would make such a facile claim, if only because of the absurdity of the notion that only 'chaps' make history.

You might not easily grasp why Mary Chamberlain's Narratives of Exile and Return is an important innovative contribution to historical scholarship if you took your cue from the ambivalent way in which the text is wrapped: on the one hand looking very much like a straight addition to the admirable Warwick Caribbean academic book series, but on the other hand introduced by the genial ser